About

I am a data scientist at eBay and a former Theoretical Cosmologist.

In my academic career I used String Theory to cook up models of the early universe. Now I use Python to recover stories from messy piles of data.

You can find me in New York City.

Here is a snapshot of academic and non academic projects that I worked on.

Wikipedia and the news

WhatHappenedThere? is a tool that matches Wikipedia traffic spikes with breaking news. A spike in traffic signals an increased interest in the webpage. This app helps to point out the reasons behind the increased interest by connecting spikes and events. When you input a topic of interest, the app finds the relevant Wikipedia page, downloads the time series and automatically detects the spikes in traffic. It then queries a database of New York Times articles and returns those articles deemed the most relevant by a natural language processing algorithm. For more details plese check out the blog post about this project.

NYC taxi data

I have been analyzing taxi data. So far this produced some pretty maps of New York City like the one in the side bar (pickup locations in red and dropoff locations in light green). The map in orange here shows the most lucrative locations to pick passengers up (in $/h). Please check out my related blog post for a full explanation of my analysis and more plots.

Congress Words

The congress_words project was built to see who discussed a certain topic in congress the most. It was based on Sunlight Foundation API that has since been discontinued, but you can still check out the code on github. Here is snippet of the the output of the app with the word "welfare", but you can get more details on how it worked on the Project page.

Election Words

Ever wondered what you should be talking about if you want to get elected to congress? The election_words website shows you the words that are spoken the most by the representatives that got re-elected the most in each state.

Portfolio Tracker

The portfolio tracker is exactly what it sounds like: a python tool that allows you to manage your stock portfolio. You can buy and get rid of stocks within it while keeping track of the value of the whole portfolio, whether real or imaginary.

Publications

1. B. Freivogel, R. Gobbetti, E. Pajer, I-S. Yang, Inflation on a Slippery Slope, Jul 2016, arXiv:1608.00041.
2. R. Gobbetti, E. Pajer, D. Roest, On the Three Primordial Numbers, May 2015, JCAP 1509 (2015) 09, 058, arXiv:1505.00968.
3. G. D'Amico, R. Gobbetti, M. Kleban, M. Schillo, D-brane scattering and annihilation, JHEP 1501 (2015) 050, Aug 2014 arXiv:1408.2540.
4. G. D'Amico, R. Gobbetti, M. Kleban, M. Schillo, Large-Scale Anomalies from Primordial Dissipation, JCAP 11 (2013) 013, Jun 2013, arXiv:1306.6872.
5. G. D'Amico, R. Gobbetti, M. Kleban, M. Schillo, Unwinding Inflation, JCAP 1303 (2013) 004, Nov 2012 arXiv:1211.4589.
6. G. D'Amico, R. Gobbetti, M. Kleban, M. Schillo, Inflation from Flux Cascades, Phys.Lett. B725 (2013) 218-222, Nov 2012 arXiv:1211.3416.
7. R. Gobbetti, M. Kleban, Analyzing Cosmic Bubble Collisions, JCAP 1205 (2012) 025, Jan 2012, arXiv:1201.6380.

Or check out the list and author page on inspire

Selected Talks

1. Unwinding Inflation and Brane Dynamics, Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study, Hong Kong, 05/2015 (pdf).
2. Brane Dynamics and Unwinding Inflation, Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A., 02/2015 (pdf).
3. Unwinding Inflation, New York University - Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 11/2014 (pdf).
4. Unwinding Inflation, International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, 05/2014 (pdf).
5. Cosmic Bubble Collisions, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto, Japan, 07/2012 (pdf).